Bay 12 Games Forum

I'll try embarking on a low-lying area, although my current fort was pretty low as it was. The elevation map had the forest biome listed as a 1 in elevation and the mountain biome between 3 and 5 -- barely a mountain, closer to a hill. And as for a 3x3 embark, well, I'm already in that and I still hit 30 FPS by the time I have 100 dwarves despite having a completely modern PC (Intel i7 processor).

There has to be some way to lower the amount of z-levels of rock. The save that inspired this search had a mere 60 levels of mineable rock compared to my current of almost 200 and it played smooth as butter 100 FPS with 80 dwarves on my computer. It was the same size embark (3x3) with all five cavern levels plus a volcano on the surface, too. The only difference I could note was that this save used a different tile set and had significantly fewer z-levels of rock.

Here's an idea with regards to pets and children... Set up a one way door to keep them out. Make a pressure plate followed by a channeled tile with a floor hatch on it. Set the pressure plate to 1,000 minimum weight and ~40,000 maximum weight and make sure to enable "citizens trigger". According to the wiki, dwarven children weight roughly 15,000, cats weigh 2,000, dogs weigh 30,000 and adult dwarves weigh roughly 60,000. Therefore, adult dwarves will pass over just fine, but dogs, cats and children will trigger the hatch to raise, preventing them from entering the room. This *should* render the room completely inaccessible by children and pets, keeping them from being impaled by the spikes.

A couple things to note: You'll probably want several of these, each on it's own entrance. Maybe as many as 10. Otherwise you could end up with children and pets permanently keeping the only entrance to the barracks open, and that would be bad. You'll also want to make sure that the hole under the floor hatch has a path back into the fortress; if a child steps on the pressure plate while an adult dwarf is on the floor hatch, the hatch will open and the dwarf will fall down the hole. If there's no way out, he'll be trapped.

Alternatively you could go the other way around and instead of locking child dwarves out of the barracks you could use this same method to lock children (and pets) into a daycare center. Given that children will follow their parents anywhere completely regardless of their burrow assignments this is likely the only way to ensure the children actually stay safe. Again, make sure to have multiple redundant entrances and put a nice food and booze stockpile in there so the children don't starve. (Or don't. But this would be a horribly inefficient way of getting rid of children.) Additionally consider putting a craftsdwarf workshop in there in the event that a child goes into a strange mood. (Or don't, if you don't mind him going insane.) This method would have the additional bonus of largely eliminating the risk posed by snatchers as well. (As if we cared about that....)

It's all theory, I haven't tried this yet, but it's worth thinking about. IMO it'd be easier than making sure you never draft cat ladies or married women, and a hell of a lot easier than dealing with the berserk axedwarf wielding a clownite battleaxe if you forget to check.

So how would one go about generating a world with fewer z-levels of rock? All of the worlds I've played in have had the standard world gen settings and have all had close to 200 layers of mineable rock -- and they've all become so slow as to be nearly unplayable at higher population levels despite the fact that my computer should be able to curbstomp this game and I suspect the rock is the culprit. Looking at worldgen.txt, I see this:

[LEVELS_ABOVE_GROUND:15]
[LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_1:5]
[LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_2:1]
[LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_3:1]
[LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_4:1]
[LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_5:2]
[LEVELS_AT_BOTTOM:1]
[CAVE_MIN_SIZE:5]
[CAVE_MIN_SIZE:5]
[CAVE_MAX_SIZE:25]
[MOUNTAIN_CAVE_MIN:25]
[NON_MOUNTAIN_CAVE_MIN:50]

That looks like the right settings to tweak... but those numbers are really, really small. Am I supposed to use decimals here? That doesn't feel right at all; nothing else in the document uses decimals.

In short, I want to try and generate a world with somewhere between 50 and 100 mineable layers of rock, not the ~200 layers I keep getting.

For the first question, I'm not positive but I believe it takes the same time to move up a square as it does down. Just make sure to have multiple staircases; you wouldn't have only one tile going into your main entrance above, you wouldn't want it here either.

For the second question, there's not exactly that but you can set (h)otkeys that zoom straight to a predetermined place. One hotkey for the surface and one hotkey for the fort would do nicely.

Building destroyers: Do they destroy, or merely disassemble?

Alrighty, so I just went through every single one of those settings and none of them had any effect on FPS. I'm quite certain these are graphical only and don't speak to computing of the fortress itself, which is the real issue.

Make no mistake, this game is still riddled with bugs. However, the worst of the worst have been mostly weeded out, and the ones that remain can either be worked around or simply ignored. It's not pleasant by any means, but if you're persistent and resourceful you can find a workaround for most every bug you'll encounter, even if that workaround just hides the bug.

Some of the big issues:
- Military still has some large bugs. Kill orders don't function well at all, and the (s)quads screen in general is very clunky, unresponsive, and generally lacks functionality. Use it like a bludgeon and it works well enough, but if you need fine control don't expect it to perform.  Equipment works well enough now for melee dwarves, although it is slow and may take a dwarf multiple activations to finally get his uniform right. With regards to training, in a 10 dwarf squad dwarves will progress so slowly it may be a bug, but in a 3 dwarf squad it actually moves along at a brisk pace -- most likely that is just a tuning issue. Militarily, though, marksdwarves have the lion's share of the remaining bugs. There are numerous bugs with regards to marksdwarves that still need to be hammered out. Most of these can be worked around, but just be warned that getting them to function in .31.12 is not for the faint of heart.

- Healthcare works well enough. Apply cast is broken almost completely; on rare occasions a dwarf will successfully apply a cast, but the vast majority of the time a bug involving drawing water from the well for his cast will stop him dead in his tracks. Workaround is to never supply gypsum plaster and instead make them use splints; these accomplish the same thing and work just fine. Surgery occasionally bugs out still, but this is rare. The one time I encountered it I locked the surgeon in the room with the patient and he finally completed surgery after almost 5 years of him starting it and then cancelling in the middle of it. One huge bug that remains, however, are crutches -- they're never used, so if a dwarf loses the ability to stand he never will again. The only workaround to that is magma. Infections also appear to be buggy, although what the bug is is unclear. It could just be that a fixed infection never takes it's tag away, leading to lots of left over infection tags on dwarves that go in and out of the hospital. Or maybe infection never kills dwarves. I don't know. Something is up for it, for sure.

- Cleaning is completely and utterly busted. The only cleaning job that functions at all any longer is the cleaning of smoothed or engraved floors. No other form of cleaning ever occurs. If a dwarf gets blood on his clothes or armor, it stays there until he wades into water and it washes off. Then another bug occurs that, when the water pushes the contaminant, it starts multiplying like mad. Next thing you know a single spatter of blood on a single dwarf has covered the walls and surface of an entire body of water. Even worse, if it's a well the blood will actually come up the well and out into the fort. It is quite disturbing, to say the least. Either way, the biggest issue with cleaning is that it's actually a large FPS drain. Keeping track of dozens of pages of contaminants per dwarf takes up a significant amount of memory and processing. The only solution I have found is nonstop use of dfcleanmap.exe, which comes from the DFHack library of tools, alongside a bath house that is permanently submerged in 3/7 to 4/7 water and designated as a meeting hall or statuary. This works fairly well in my experience. And when I say constant, I mean constant; the moment I see blood I use it lest the blood begin to multiply and contaminate more dwarves' clothing.

- Ownership is completely busted at the moment. Clothes that a dwarf arrives with are owned by the dwarf and no other dwarf may touch or move them, but once they become threadbare the dwarf will discard them on the floor -- yet the discarded raiments are still considered 'owned', so they cannot be moved. For the most part this is harmless although annoying, but occasionally one drops his threadbare clothes on a tile with a door in it that needs to be forbidden during sieges, acting as the proverbial 'monarch butterfly corpse', so to speak. The only workaround for that in particular is to notice it ahead of time, deconstruct the door, then reconstruct it in the same spot -- this will cause the hauler dwarf to move the clothes one tile away so they no longer prop the door open. As for working around the massive litter of clothes you end up with, well, your choices are to ignore it, use (d)-(b)-(h) to hide the clothes (they're still there, just you can't see them), or to apply magma. Another related issue with ownership involves dwarves claiming food and then not eating it. The claimed but uneaten food will then be placed somewhere, often in the dwarves' rooms but for some reason they love to put them on armor stands as well, and then the dwarf forgets about them. The food cannot be moved because it is owned, the owning dwarf won't eat the food, and eventually it rots away, producing miasma if outside. It is annoying, to say the least.

- Nobles are also very buggy at the moment. The appointment of a baron and his subsequent promotion to count and duke are very difficult, although possible, to achieve -- a workaround is possible, but you have to know what it is. Additionally many of the noble positions simply do not appear any more; of key note is the dungeon master, who is completely MIA. Inheritance of hereditary positions (Baron/Count/Duke and Monarch) is either uncertain or outright broken. Addtionally, if you do actually become the mountainhome and get the monarch to arrive, diplomats and liasons simply disappear; no more trade agreements can be made and no more meetings ever occur. You can't even tell the elves off when they ask you to stop cutting down trees, because they never ask. Collectively these issues add up to make the nobles system very unreliable and ultimately broken. It isn't a core, necessary feature of the game so it can be ignored, but it's still annoying. Also, for the DM, the workaround is to replace all [PET_EXOTIC] tags with just [PET]. Here is a mod that does just that, although you have to gen a new world for it to work: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59411.0

- Beds. Dwarves will sleep anywhere. Even in the hospital. This leads to nonstop "slept without a proper room recently" thoughts. Tables work similarly, although less severe. Any table in the fort could be used, including the operating tables in the hospital. In my fort this lead to so many "complained about a lack of chairs" thoughts that I just said screw it and put chairs next to all of the operating tables. If they want to eat there, I say let them. I hope they get an infection and die. Or not, because infections (probably) don't work anyway.



There are many, many more bugs than this. These are just the major ones. No one bug renders the game unplayable, thankfully, but there are more bugs in this game than there are in my city. It's just a matter of how severe, and whether or not you can deal with them.